This novel is constructed as a set of interdependent short stories which all follow the same family, the McCaslin family.
"Was"
Edmonds helps his Uncle Buck to chase a slave runaway into a nearby plantation. When they get there to pick up Turl (the runaway slave), the plantation owner tries to push his sister off onto Buck by urging him to marry her. Instead, he accepts a female slave as a wife for Turl.
"The Fire and the Hearth"
Lucas Beauchamp is a McCaslin descendent who searches for buried treasure. He is the "descendent of a negro lover," which is to say that according to pre-emancipation law, he was "black enough" to be made a slave if anyone ever found out. He digs holes by day and prays no one finds out about his ancestry, until one day, his wife leaves him.
"The Pantaloon in Black"
A black man named Rider is grieving the loss of his wife. In his distraught state, he retaliates against a white man's mistreatment of him, and he kills the white man, and that night, he is lynched by the local Ku Klux Klan.
"The Old People"
Young Isaac McCaslin has a half-Native American mentor named Sam Fathers. Sam teaches Isaac how to hunt, and Isaac kills his first game, a sizable buck. According to Native American ritual, Sam anoints Isaac with the blood of his first game, and suddenly, Isaac has a transcendental religious experience during which he encounters a primordial deer spirit. Sam tells him upon the end of his vision that he has met, "Grandfather."
"The Bear"
Isaac has become a master of the hunt. He now hunts with the elders at Major de Spain's camp in their ongoing hunt of a giant bear named "Old Ben." His experience of hunting with white men is so against the spirit of his anointment that he quits the hunt and disowns himself from his own birthright, claiming that no matter what human law says, mankind does not own land.
"Delta Autumn"
In the autumn, an aging Isaac travels to the Mississippi River Delta. He meets the woman who ends up having Carothers Edmond's child, a signal that he is becoming the ancestor.
Gavin Stevens, the district attorney of Jefferson, has been tasked to help Molly Beauchamp retrieve the corpse of her grandson. The young man has been executed by the law.
